NVIDIA’s scenario about the GeForce / Quadro / Tesla line-up experienced a lot of turnover over the past couple of years. The sequence of “launch as GeForce, downclock as Tesla, optimize and launch as Quadro,” changed into “launch as Tesla, optimize as GeForce and be reliable as Quadro”. With Pascal, story turned to be almost the same. NVIDIA introduced GP100 as Tesla in April 2016, followed with GP102 chip as Titan X (no longer branded as GeForce), Quadro P6000 and Tesla P40. At the same time, the GP104/106/107 did not experience the same sequence, with only GP104 debuting as Quadro P5000 and Tesla P40. Second day of

Even though HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) standard only launched last June in the form of AMD’s Fiji GPU, that memory was considered a ‘trial run’ for HBM2 – a memory standard which is here to stay. Launching in mid-2016 with AMD Polaris and NVIDIA Pascal, HBM2 memory standard will redefine computing as we know it. There are several memory standards which want to replace DDR and GDDR memory standards, including Intel-Micron 3D XPoint (pronounced: Cross Point) Optane memory – but HBM looks to have the widest support. If we compare this to HBM2, it had 1GB capacity and offered 0.5 Gbps bandwidth in 4-Cube configuration for a

2016 will be marked with the arrival of two memory standards, which should spread across the mainstream and high-end / enthusiast line-up like fire. First, we have the HBM2, an improved version of HBM memory which debuted (and so far, only ships inside) with AMD R9 Fury family of cards. HBM2 promises a four times increase in capacity and double the memory bandwith – meaning a single card can go from 4GB and 512GB/s to 16GB and 1TB/s. Given the low volume of HBM and HBM2 memory, those two will probably remain only on enthusiast graphics cards, such as recently renamed Greenland, high-end Polaris graphics processor from AMD

Samsung Semiconductor is on a roll of late. The company introduced FinFET transistors with the 14nm process last year for logic, beating Intel for the first time in history to to a new manufacturing node. 14nm process expanded from in-house Exynos SoC processors to customers such as Apple, Qualcomm and others, while Intel was trying to get Broadwell architecture out the door. This process was followed by the announcement of ultra-dense 15nm NAND Flash memory, and now the company announced mass-production of next-gen memory standard – HBM2. The company announced that it started mass production of High-Bandwidth Memory 2 chips using its 20nm process, which just got

Couple of days ago, GlobalFoundries issued a press release stating that they ‘demonstrated silicon success on the first AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) products using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ most advanced 14nm FinFET process technology.’ “FinFET technology is expected to play a critical foundational role across multiple AMD product lines, starting in 2016. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has worked tirelessly to reach this key milestone on its 14LPP process. We look forward to GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ continued progress towards full production readiness and expect to leverage the advanced 14LPP process technology across a broad set of our CPU, APU, and GPU products,” said Mark Papermaster, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Advanced Micro Devices.

At the Japanese edition of NVIDIA GTC (GPU Technology Conference), NVIDIA finally revealed details behind its 2016 graphics architecture, codenamed Pascal. The architecture was launched at the main GTC event, which took place in San Jose on March 17th, 2015 (watch Jen-Hsun Huang’s GTC keynote here). GTC Japan was hosted by Marc Hamilton. As always, the Pascal GPU will be manufactured in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), using the brand new 16nm FinFET process. This process is much more than a simple number, since it marks the shift from planar, 2D transistors to the FinFET i.e. 3D transistors. This shift required that the engineers make lot of changes in the